WASHINGTON -- A panel of technologists, privacy advocates, industry reps, and government officials met in Washington, put their heads together, and tried to figure out how to get Jason Catlett's mom online.
The problem, explained Catlett -- founder of Junkbusters and a participant in a Commerce Department meeting Tuesday on Internet privacy and ecommerce -- is that his mom has decided the Internet is no place for private citizens.
"I don't think cyberspace really sounds like a very safe place," she recently told her son. Her concern stems from precisely the quality that makes the Web so attractive to 21st century marketers: its ability to track her electronic whims. As she explained to her son, "I had thought that surfing the Web was like watching TV, that no one was watching when I changed the channel."
The reason the Clinton administration has taken an interest in the Internet, of course, is that it isn't like TV at all. Television created a new form of entertainment, changing the way generations of viewers experienced the world and news. But the Internet is another order of magnitude.
"It is clear that electronic commerce -- the conduct of business over the Internet and the use of other electronic means -- will be a major factor that drives our economy over the next decade and beyond," Commerce Secretary William Daley wrote in the June issue of the Journal of Information Policy. "The Internet has the potential to become the country's most active trade vehicle, creating scores of high-paying jobs and revolutionizing the way companies do business with each other and with their customers."
"[The president] is well aware that ecommerce can soon be a US$300 billion business," Daley said today. "He does not want to do anything that would mess up all of that success."
To that end, the Clinton administration issued a 1 July 1997 directive asking industry to set up a series of privacy policies to protect online consumers. Industry rushed to assure the world that it would do everything it could to ensure online privacy.
So far, businesses have come up short, and Clinton is frustrated with their progress. At a New York roundtable last month, Ira Magaziner, the administration's point man on Internet policy, warned that if industry didn't step up to the privacy plate, he would.
Observers have suggested that by divulging data collection techniques and how online data is used, businesses could protect consumers. Online businesses have largely failed to reach that relatively low bar.
A Federal Trade Commission survey released earlier this month found that just 14 percent of the 674 US commercial web sites it sampled offered even "the barest hint of an inference" of their information collection practices, as the FTC's Martha Landesberg put it at Tuesday's conference.
The two-day Commerce Department meeting represents one of the last chances for civil libertarians to make their case about how privacy should be protected on the Web. Commerce and the Office of Management and Budget are scheduled to report to the President on industry efforts at self-regulation.
Even among privacy advocates, no one disputes the Web's potential for generating huge amounts of cash and reinvigorating American enterprise. Services like Ebay, an online auction house, prove any argument bankrupt. In two and a half years, Ebay has opened entirely new sectors of the economy, allowing some 850,000 people to trade hundreds of millions of dollars of knickknacks, collectibles, and crafts that would have otherwise languished in people's attics, generating nothing but dust.
The Web's moneymaking potential does little to placate civil libertarians, however. "Why do we have to trade great service for privacy?" asked Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a DC-based civil rights group.
The invariable answer is that, in fact, no quid pro quo is necessary. Internet users can have it all: privacy, plus a world of consumer goods and services at their fingertips. Industry representatives insist that maintaining customer confidentiality is simply a matter of good sense. "We want to make sure that trust is not squandered through poor privacy practices," said Richard Mossberg of the Ford Motor Credit Company.
Such expressions of good faith have so far carried little weight with the public, however. According to a survey released today, "Ecommerce and Privacy Survey," 81 percent of all Net users and 79 percent of online shoppers worry about the online invasion of privacy. The study was conducted by Louis Harris & Associates and Dr. Alan F. Westin, a professor of public law and government at Columbia University.
There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence to justify those concerns. Catlett told of an elderly woman who received a threatening letter from a convicted rapist who had somehow gotten access to a database containing some 900 discrete pieces of personal information about her.
Beth Givens of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse told the story of a man who slipped, fell, and destroyed his knee cap in a San Diego grocery store. When he sued, the grocery store's attorneys delved into their records, saw the man had a discount card and a taste for alcohol, and used the information to deflect responsibility for the accident.
There was no consensus on whether the government should continue to allow industry to regulate itself. Predictably, business supports self-regulation, while privacy advocates support the creation of a privacy commission.
But Robert Gellman, a Washington privacy consultant and former chief counsel to the House Government Operations Subcommittee on Information, Justice, Transportation, and Agriculture, sounded a note of historical caution. "In 1983, 183 large companies signed a document saying they would uphold OECD privacy guidelines," he said. "Did the endorsement have any effect? After all, it was the first attempt at self regulation."
Gellman's answer didn't offer industry much hope. "A year later, of 34 companies we followed up with, only seven CEOs knew that their companies were signatories," he said. "Another three strongly denied it. We need to make sure we don't just [have] another flurry activity with no effect."
